How Quality of Writing Instruction Impacts High-risk Fourth Graders’ Writing

Abstract

From a larger longitudinal study of 610 fourth graders in 17 inner city schools, 40 students were randomly selected from 10 classrooms rated high (i.e., top quartile) or low (i.e., bottom quartile) in quality of writing instruction in grades 3 and 4. The written compositions of these students were scored in three ways: (1) according to a rating scale within a reliable scoring rubric, (2) according to countable surface features such as words correctly sequenced, and (3) according to the frequency of specific phonological, morphosyntactic, and orthographic errors in the children's writing. A multivariate analysis of variance was conducted to examine whether quality of writing instruction in grades 3 and 4 predicted students' writing performance at the end of grade 4. Students who received high quality instruction in fourth grade wrote longer compositions with more correctly spelled words than those who had poor quality writing instruction. There was a tendency for two years of quality instruction to be better than one, and, among students who had poor quality instruction in grade 3, compositions were longer in grade 4 when they received quality instruction in fourth grade. Foundational problems of language formulation, production and representation, however, were ubiquitous across the sample. Although these students were within the average range on standardized reading tests, spelling and writing were not developing at average levels. The study confirms the urgent need for more and better writing instruction for high risk, minority children.

Knowledge foundations for teaching reading and spelling

“…Children with poor vocabularies are also likely to be unfamiliar with the academic or formal English language patterns read in books or required in writing. By the intermediate grades, we found that the majority of the lower SES children in our study sample were poorly prepared for the demands of academic, expository writing (Moats, Foorman, & Taylor, 2006). Sustained and systematic instruction in the word usage, syntax and discourse structure of English is as important for these children as instruction in the expressive aspects of writing.…”

Teacher Characteristics, Classroom Instruction, and Student Literacy and Language Outcomes in Bilingual Kindergartners

“…As in Tuerk (2005), effect sizes were small (1%-4%) for teacher quality and large (31%-50%) for initial reading ability. Teacher quality also predicted students' writing performance in grades 2 through 4 (Mehta, Foorman, Branum-Martin, & Taylor, 2005;Moats, Foorman, & Taylor, 2006). In a recent study by Borman and Kimball (2005), teacher quality affected grade 4 reading and grade 5 math performance with effect sizes of .21 and .11, respectively, but did not affect these academic skills in other grades.…”

Development of Spelling and Differential Relations to Text Reading in Grades 3-12

“…The consequences of poor spelling are apparent in reading and in writing. With respect to reading, incomplete orthographic representations impede decoding (Foorman & Francis, 1994); with respect to writing, lack of knowledge of a word's spelling leads to avoidance of words and, hence, less lexical diversity (Moats, Foorman, & Taylor, 2006).…”